Electron - consistent performance and spinning up a child Node.js process

Before I give some background, I'd like to clarify that I'm not looking for how to simply spawn a new script under the Electron runtime as a renderer process, I'm trying to use a plain Node runtime.

So I'm aware Electron has some different flavor of a JS runtime under its hood similar to NW.js and I'm trying to get consistent performant results for my report.

Unfortunately this seems to be much more difficult than I had imagined. I'm specifically testing the speed of the mailparser module although that's not necessarily important here.

1. I first ran it on the Electron app we're working with, which uses Electron Forge. I called the test script through IPC as that's what we intend to use, so it was called within the callback for ipcMain.handle. Here, the performance was really bad and it was taking 30-50 seconds for our test to complete.

2. I then ran a test script that just opens a blank HTML file in the same Electron Forge app, and runs the test script in the background. This was much better at 8-12 seconds.

Next, I set up a new directory with a test set, a plain Electron installation, and a mailparser installation. I did not electron-rebuild here, but mailparser does rely on node-iconv and so has native bindings.

3. I ran a test script with Electron just calling the same line of code. This did not use Electron Forge. The performance here was slightly better at 5-9 seconds.

4. I then ran another test script, this time just with plain old node, and the performance here was excellent at 1-3s.

So I have two questions here:

1. Why the performance varying so much in the Electron tests? Although I used IPCMain, I used the new .handle which should be asynchronous and run in the context of Electron's node runtime, so it should have the same performance as running outside the callback. Moreover the Electron Forge and plain Electron tests also differ by a couple seconds which made no sense to me as I assumed Electron Forge would just wrap the Electron binary under the hood.

2. Seeking optimal and consistent results, I'm wondering how I can spin up a child process with the node runtime inside Electron. Doing this normally just starts a new renderer process which is running Electron's (slower) JS runtime. I'd like to avoid leaving Electron Forge but the only solution I can think of is to bundle precompiled binaries with the process running under the Node runtime built for each platform.

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